Bleeker Hill

by Russell Mardell

  Bleeker Hill

  Russell Mardell

  Copyright © 2015 Russell Mardell

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,

  or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents

  Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in

  any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the

  publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with

  the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries

  concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  Matador®

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  ISBN 978 1784626 228

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Cover design by David Baker

  Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  Converted to eBook by EasyEPUB

  For Kerry

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Russell Mardell

  Prologue

  Apart

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Together

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Air

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Blood

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Shelter

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Night

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Attack

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Possession

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  The story continues...

  Also by Russell Mardell

  Stone Bleeding

  Silent Bombs Falling on Green Grass

  Prologue

  Arrival

  They arrived just after dawn, the two old army utility trucks slowing and sliding on the icy road that cut through the forest and then broke on to the top of the hill. They came to rest neatly together whilst the small quad bike snowplough carried on down, cutting them a slithering path towards the house. To call it a house seemed an understatement of magnificent proportions. It was grander and more opulent than any of them had ever seen before – a great, sprawling mansion, a monument to a forgotten time. To see such a building in such a time as they were living in was almost unheard of and none of them could tear their eyes away. The house seemed to be all there was for miles; a forgotten life picked up and dumped down where nothing else could see it or touch it. It was the perfect place to disappear, the ideal place to start again, and it didn’t take a genius to see why it had been chosen.

  As the weak sun gave its token gesture above them, contemplating its position amongst the greying clouds, they saw the balloons in the sky that they had been looking for ever since cresting the hill; the sure sign that they were close. The balloons bloomed together in clusters as they rose up from beyond the great house, before breaking apart in the sky and then drifting away on the sharp breeze; red, and white and blue shapes, the only colour in the tired and washed-out skyline.

  Everyone rechecked their weaponry for what felt like the hundredth time. Now, though, there was a finality and threat in every click of every gun as their nervous fingers and hands set to work. Their journey had been arduous; the many miles of travelling along the valleys treacherous, narrow roads had been bad enough, but the oncoming snow had caused long delays and improvised detours. The three-day trip had become a five-day expedition and now, finally at their destination, they felt spent, and ruined. But the real work hadn’t even begun.

  Lucas Hennessey held Mia in his arms in the cab of the lead truck, stroking her hair and gently rocking her from side to side, pulling the rug tighter over her shoulders and folding the ends over her bare neck. Her fever appeared to be getting worse, her face seemed to glow in the darkness of the cab, and the tacky, sweaty skin he could feel whenever he mopped her brow worried him. His daughter had been fine when they set out; she’d even taken turns at the wheel of the truck, her eighteen years seeming impossible, her boundless energy and enthusiasm an infectious encouragement. But by the end of the second day Mia had started to change, to seemingly age under his gaze and slowly shrivel in his arms.

  Wallace had been a medic in the army back in the old country, many years before everything that had happened and he would tend to her as best he could, but medical supplies were pretty scarce and what was there seemed to be ineffective. By the third day he had all but given up on her, and by the fourth no one spoke about her any more, and everyone stared.

  As Finn hopped off the snowplough and waved back up the hill to the two trucks, Hennessey looked down at his daughter to see her asleep against his chest. Wallace turned the engine over and shifted the lead truck forward as gently as he could, pumping the brake in short blasts. Behind them, Connor fired up the other truck and delicately edged forward in their tracks. With his free hand, Hennessey pulled out his mobile phone from his jacket and clumsily thumbed a number. The signal was weak, and the voice that answered the call faint, but between the rasp of the truck’s engine and the angry crackle of the phone line he just about recognised Kendrick’s voice.

  ‘This is point team,’ Hennessey shouted into the phone. ‘The king has his castle. Repeat, the king has his castle.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘The king has…’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘This is Hennessey, you dickhead. We’ve arrived. Out.’

  *

  They cut the truck’s engines before reaching the house and rolled the last few yards, coming to a stop in the snow-covered courtyard; the ploughed walls along the freshly cut pathway a gentle buffer against the tyres. Connor jumped down from the second truck and, with Finn, rounded the south side of the building, their machine guns primed in front of them, beckoning on whatever they were about to face. Wallace turned to Hennessey in the lead truck, and Hennessey waved absently in the air between them, urging Wallace on.

  ‘Take position, I will be right behind you.’

  ‘We go in pairs, Lucas. That was the deal. That was what you said.’

  ‘Whose safety are you concerned about, Wallace? Mine or yours?’

  ‘He’s a madman.’

  ‘We’ve got a job to do.’

  ‘You’ve heard the stories about this place, I know you have.’

  ‘After everything you’ve seen, now you’re scared of stories?’

  ‘What about Grennaught?’

  ‘He’s dead. What about the living?’

  ‘People disappeared here.’

  ‘Take position, Wallace.’

  Wallace seemed to be trying to gulp down air in his throat. His right hand instinctively went to the side of his neck and seemed to hover t
here, the index finger tapping against the skin. ‘I had this dream,’ he started, before stopping abruptly and pulling his hand away, seemingly surprised by his own voice.

  ‘Dream?’ The word knocked Hennessey’s calm demeanour momentarily and shook the authority from his voice. ‘What dream?’

  Wallace narrowed his eyes and seemed to be scrutinising Hennessey’s face.

  ‘What dream, Wallace?’

  ‘I dreamed how I was going to die. I saw it. Felt it.’

  Hennessey moved to speak but could offer nothing more than a grunt.

  ‘You have too, haven’t you, Lucas?’

  For the longest of seconds they said nothing, though their eyes were quick to betray their silence. It was enough for Wallace and he answered his own question of his boss with a slow, purposeful nod of the head.

  ‘Dreams and tall tales,’ Hennessey snapped, stealing back his command and jerking a finger to the house beyond the windscreen. ‘Do you really want this conversation, Wallace?’

  ‘The way the country is, it’s easy to believe in fate, right?’

  ‘Take position.’

  ‘I mean, it’s normal isn’t it? It doesn’t make me a madman, does it?’

  ‘Take position, Wallace. Now.’

  Hennessey waved Wallace on again and turned back to Mia. Decision made, conversation over. Wallace shifted slowly around in the driver’s seat, his hand pausing at the door, and then gently slipped out of the cab, landing with a soft crunch on the snow.

  Staring at his daughter’s sleeping face, Hennessey found Wallace’s words echoing through his mind, trying to distort his vision and his control. He had dreamed deep and long these last few weeks. Ever since he was tasked with the mission, he had remembered his dreams vividly. He had seen things in his dreams, had felt them encroaching over his waking hours, and now, as so many times before, he took a hand to his heart and felt the pain his sub-conscious mind had already revealed to him. He refused to give Wallace’s words space in that moment, he wouldn’t allow questions that made no sense; he had got this far by controlling facts and acting on whatever truth lay before him, he wasn’t going to succumb to any sort of madness now. That was for the rest of the country. Not him. As the pain in his heart slowly abated to it’s usual nagging dullness, he took his hand away and gripped the certainty of his shotgun, and as he did, everything made sense.

  Hennessey brushed away a knotted clump of hair from Mia’s forehead and gazed at his daughter’s face, aware already of the tears trickling down his own and hoping she wouldn’t wake at that moment and see.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mia. This is my fault. I should have left you with your mother. But it wasn’t safe there, you know that, don’t you? Your mother is a very stubborn woman. But I will keep you safe here. I promise I will. When everyone else arrives we will get you seen to properly. Then sooner or later we will make this place home. We are going to start again. We are going to build everything from scratch. The Party will see that everything is okay. We will be happy here. Just you and me. I promise.’

  Hennessey lowered his daughter down across the front seats of the truck’s cab and readjusted the rug around her neck. For one brief moment he seemed to freeze, his hands clutching the end of the rug, not wanting to let go, wanting to hold on and pull it tighter. But, no sooner did the feeling come over him, than it went again, and then Hennessey was sat upright, staring out at the house through the snow-splattered windscreen, distracted by something at the back of his mind that wanted to be heard, grabbing at a thought and a feeling that he wanted to understand. The icy winter breeze came into the cab, whistling like the devil’s own theme tune, and slowly, uncomfortably, Hennessey took his shotgun back into hands that didn’t feel like his own and climbed down from the cab.

  He followed Wallace’s footprints in the snow, across the courtyard and around to the north side of the building. A lifeless balloon hid in the snow under his feet and he jumped as it popped under him, fumbling the shotgun in his hands, his heart shooting through his body as if it had just been drop kicked. He stopped, waited, and breathed deeply, steadying his control. Pulling the shotgun back into his grasp he continued forward again, edging around the house and walking as lightly as he could in Wallace’s path.

  The north side was more exposed than the courtyard and the wind whipped up instantly and battered him, the heartless cold force probing every inch of exposed skin. He crouched down, gun in his lap, and tightened the toggle at the top of his coat. He looked forward towards Wallace’s footprints and then craned around and stared back up the hill to the point where they had entered, between the trees. It seemed so far away at that moment, the forest on either side sucking the road out of sight. His eyes followed the snowplough’s path down to the house and rested on the truck where his daughter slept. He had to keep Mia safe; somehow, amongst all that was happening, and all he had to do, nothing else would matter if he failed to protect her. Looking up, he saw the balloons floating over him and he suddenly wanted to take the machine gun from his back and blast them all out of the air, decimate them under a wave of brutal gunfire. Maybe he would, he thought. Once the mission is done, maybe he would do that very thing.

  Hennessey pulled himself up and started walking in Wallace’s footsteps again, the shotgun sweeping left to right in front of him, his painful eyes alert to everything, yet seeing nothing. He had gone no more than twenty feet when his left foot, instead of slipping neatly into Wallace’s next footprint, crunched down through a patch of virgin snow and brought him to a staggering halt. Wallace’s footprints had stopped and in front of him was nothing but untouched snow. Hennessey spun around on the spot, first behind him, then to the house. There was no trace of Wallace anywhere.

  ‘Wallace?’ Hennessey whispered into the air. ‘Wallace? Get back in position, don’t make me come find you!’

  He moved on, crunching through new snow, his finger hovering over the trigger of the shotgun, and then he stopped again and was crouching down. In front of him, about ten feet ahead, a wide channel seemed to have been carved in the snow, running across his position and then away to the right, directly into the wall of the house. Looking back to the channel in the snow he followed it the other way and saw it break ahead, the smoothness becoming a large, body-shaped dent and giving way to a clumsy set of footprints scattering away into the distance. The first three footprints were splattered with blood, and after that they didn’t look like footprints at all.

  *

  To Finn it was all a bit of fun. Here he was playing macho man with a gun and being encouraged to do so. Finn had been sprung from jail like most of the team, and instead of embracing his second chance of freedom he merely rode it as a licence to do as he pleased. No one liked him, and that was just how he liked it. He was the only member of the point team unconcerned about the mission, and the only one who volunteered. In fact, as far as Finn was concerned, he would have been happy if they had sent him by himself, strapped up in machine guns and carrying a machete between his teeth.

  Finn was also the only one of the team who had witnessed the Wash firsthand, or at least he had been around it, and had seen people, fellow inmates, bagged up and bundled away. He had heard the stories like everyone else, but where many still believed it an urban myth, Finn knew all too well that rather than being a scare story, the Wash was, in fact, all too real.

  Connor had asked so many questions about the Wash during their stops on the journey in, and Finn had been all too glad to be the centre of attention. It was only Hennessey constantly shouting them down that had stopped them. Now it was just the two of them, Connor wasted no time in piping up again.

  ‘So, it’s like some sort of electric shock treatment? Like they used to give the loonies, right? Or is it drugs? Schaeffer was a head quack, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Pills, potions and probes, reckon they have given most things a spin at this place. Depends who you speak to. I heard Kendrick talk about some miracle drug that Schaeffer had got all long and tough abou
t, that was what they tested out first. That was what I saw when I was still inside. He reckoned he could wipe their minds with one simple injection into the brain. Boom! Pump that shit right on in the old grey matter.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Didn’t work, kid. We lost about a hundred inmates in my nick alone to that first round of trials. Party plod would come for them in the night, we would hear them screaming, grown men I’m talking about here, hardened bastards and killers and they were screaming like little girls. Then they would be sent back about a week later. They would just be there, back in their cells, or shuffling around the courtyards, like they had never been away. But they were blasted, kid, I’m telling you. They looked carved out. Dead. Sometimes we would see some little dude with a clipboard standing there watching them, monitoring them. Man, they had messed them up good. First time I saw one turn he bit the neck out of one of the monitors, right there in the courtyard. It turned most of them psycho, the ones that didn’t start bleeding out their ears and eyes that is, those never even made it back from this place, poor bastards. I’ve seen good men tear arms out of sockets, pluck out eyes…one guy even…’